You already know we’re of a mixed opinion about Iron Man 3 here, with Dan liking it and Nathan giving 10 reasons to hate it. I’m of the opinion that I live in the middle of nowhere and won’t drive two hours for any first-run movie. But you know what might make me drive that far? If Marvel had left the “lead character broadcasts homemade sex tape in a Home Depot” scene in the final draft. It’s a tale as old as time.

But wait, the sex tape was going to be between Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce)? Uh, nevermind.

The revelation comes from a podcast at Empire, in which Iron Man 3 director Shane Black and co-writer Drew Pearce discuss the production.

While a good majority of the talk is rather spoiler-heavy, Black and Pearce do talk about some developments in early drafts of the script that wound up being cut before the making of the film. There were completely different villains involved such as Madden, Kreeger, and Edwin Cord. But most notably, was Shane Black mentioning this interesting little tidbit:

“Pepper, in one draft, slept with [Aldrich] Killian because he was so pheromonially enhanced with this Extremis that she couldn’t resist him and she was angry with Tony and so she sleeps with Killian and then he makes a sex tape and broadcasts it in Home Depot.” [The Playlist]

Probably for the better that they left it out. This would not nourish my inner aspect at all.

Here’s the full podcast. The section with Black and Pearce starts about forty-five minutes in, and there are spoilers throughout.

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I think a sex tape would have made sense if it were Tony and some hot stranger (or five), but that would have sent Pepper in another direction so I can see it would have been unnecessary. But a Stark sex tape absolutely seems like something that would happen. His home is probably full of cameras, and then there’s the idea that that same Home Depot camera picked it up and an employee sold the tape.